OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT CR RAMAPHOSA

Open Letter to President Cyril Ramaphosa

By Noko Maleka | Insight Jozi News  

Happy Human Rights Month, Mr. President.  

I extend this greeting with deliberate irony. Because while you and the ruling party celebrate speeches and lights inside Constitutional Hill, just meters away, elderly victims of apartheid sleep in plastic shelters, exposed to Johannesburg’s rain and winter.  

These are not melodramatic South Africans seeking attention. They are men and women carrying wounds of bullets — some lodged in their heads, some in their legs. They are survivors who lost parents to apartheid soldiers, women who were repeatedly violated, families who bore the full brutality of a system declared a crime against humanity. Yet today, they are treated as if apartheid was merely a “social misunderstanding.”  

Mr. President, you have never carried bullets in your body. You were never tortured by apartheid soldiers. Your life, by comparison, was marked by privilege — and later, by handsome benefits through Black Economic Empowerment. Perhaps it is this distance from the pain of ordinary victims that has led you and your predecessors, from Thabo Mbeki onward, to block reparations and deny redress. But let me be clear: reparations have not been given to the actual victims.  

The Galela reparations group, along with Khulumani and others, have camped outside Constitutional Hill for over two years. They are not asking for luxury. They are asking for dignity. They are asking for shelter. They are asking for recognition of their suffering.  

Since 2023, I have watched some of them die in the cold. I have seen them endure rain without toilets, without roofs, without compassion. And yet, just meters away, empty government buildings stand unused, waiting to be hijacked. Why not provide one of these buildings as a dignified old age home near Constitutional Hill, so they can continue their struggle from a place of humanity?  

Justice delayed is dignity denied.  

Mr. President, this Human Rights Month, I call on you directly:  

- Provide an old age home near Constitutional Hill for the Galela reparations group.  

- Stop gatekeeping the TRC resolutions.  

- Recognize apartheid as the crime against humanity it was, not a misunderstanding.  

- Engage with human rights groups to ensure these survivors are not erased from history.  

South Africa cannot celebrate Human Rights Day while apartheid victims die outside the Constitutional Court. Constitutional Hill must not remain a monument to contradiction.  

Respectfully, yet urgently,  

Noko Maleka  

Insight Jozi News  

insightjozinews.blogspot.com  

noko.maleka@insightjozinews.org

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